Let Us Ascend
by bioldrawings
Summary: A short story set during the days of Rapture's collapse. They'd stopped hoping that the city could be saved, now each only hoped that they would survive. In two parts. Rated T to be safe.
1. Hope

Disclaimer: Bioshock isn't mine. Which is a shame because that would be awesome. Foster is mine. 

Also I don't own the gramaphone, cigarettes or elevators.

My first fic. One day I'll look back on this and probably cry. But right now I love it.

**Let us Ascend**

**Chapter One - Hope**

So many people. That was the first thing, the press of grimy, crowded bodies that pushed against the senses before the noise. Not surprising, the noise was an omnipresent force in Rapture now, shouting, gunshots, screaming. Always, always screaming, wherever you went. But so many people in one place... The streets were always so empty, for all the noise, but here the people were so crowded that every movement pushed against skin and cheap fabrics.

May Foster saw the crowd before the elevator was even halfway down. When the glistening doors slid open she didn't even bother stepping out. She gripped her bag strap a little tighter, though. If nothing else, Rapture was paradise to opportunists, snatching a purse to the backdrop of a city descending into hell for the sake of a few bucks and a half-empty pack of cigarettes? Naturally. All part of the Great Chain.

The family she'd shared the too-small space with hesitated just a moment before pushing past her and into the throng. Within a second they could barely be distinguished from the rest of the throbbing, swearing mass. Another second and they were gone. May could almost understand their hope in the face of such odds; one of the three children had been a little girl of around seven.

But it was a hope she could not share. If nothing else, she was a realist. It was a well-honed skill for a woman who's income came from her own work, especially since that work did not involve removing any clothing at any point. Until she'd run out of money to spend on models and had to resort to a mirror and try not to catch her own eye. May was an artist, not of blood and cells like so many others here these days, but of paint and canvas.

She'd never been very good, but that didn't matter now. Before her was a melting pot of class, born rich, born poor, made-it-big and lost-it-all. Money wasn't important any more. Just survival.

And surviving was fast becoming a luxury none could afford.

For just one brief moment, she contemplated joining the crowd. Perhaps she would be one of the lucky ones... Perhaps (and the guilt in the thought did not sting as much as it might once have) she would survive while the rest of these people died. Safely floating away in the bathysphere she'd once come in on. She'd looked with awe unbelieving on Rapture that day. It was nothing compared to what she'd feel to see the sky again.

But the thought evaporated under the heat of innumerable desperate bodies. There would be no "lucky ones". Everyone before her, everyone she knew, the whole _goddamned_ city, was going to die.

She was going to die. There was no way out.

There was no way out.

There was no way out.

And she was going to die.

She delicately tapped the golden button. The door slid shut and she resisted the urge to think of how the bars made her feel trapped, imprisoned in a sinking cage even as the elevator ascended.


	2. Gramophone

**Chapter Two – Gramophone**

The apartment was plain and dingy. The only way to tell that it had been lived in at all was that some of the paint stains looked fairly fresh. May was careful to put the chain on when she shut the door. This apartment obviously had nothing worth taking, but thieves didn't seem to care about such trivialities as picking their targets any more.

And one thing Rapture had taught everyone of her inhabitants was just how easily a life held tenderly against one's chest could be ripped away. A heart on one's sleeve torn off and left too bleed. A skull cracked, a throat cut, a body charred beyond all recognition by fire and lightening, flung about by men who looked like demons and thought themselves gods.

She sat in her only chair, hands folded in her lap. The canvases stacked haphazardly in the corner were a little green around the edges, the paint was beginning to run, too. But it had been a while since anything as base and quaint as a painting come be sold in this city. To think that one of her little sketches had caught Ryan's eye an eternity ago. Her ticket to Rapture...

She wished she'd burnt it, torn it up, become a shopkeeper just like Daddy, just been a little less accomplished at her art. Anything that meant she wouldn't be here, in these dirty clothes in this dirty flat, waiting to find out how she'd die.

She touched her fingertips to her face. Plain, dull and forgettable, but still recognisably hers, if a little worn. The woman two doors down had spent every cent she could get (May didn't like to think on how she got them) on Adam. Smoother skin, fuller lips. She'd looked stunning. And then the money ran out and she didn't look stunning for very long after that. Evicted, she'd still wandered the halls every other day or so, broke in and stole whatever she could from the occupants.

She thought about the last time she'd seen Gracie Stevens, and pushed her hands into her skull, as if the memories could be forced out if she could only push hard enough.

May wished now that she hadn't called the police, but what else could she do?

And she'd known that the bathysphere station would be hopeless, but what else could she do?

…

Nothing moved in the grimy apartment, but it was not silent. The steady drip-drip of something leaking somewhere. What sounded like begging from the hall outside. A scratching in the walls that in any other city might have been rats.

From one of the adjacent rooms, the creaky strains of a gramophone leaked through the cheap plaster.

A thin sobbing that echoed strangely in this dusty space.

After awhile the door was unchained, opened once and shut. The burglars who broke in two days later would be surprised that it wasn't locked, and disappointed by the lack of hidden treasures.

After they left, the door did not open again.

**End**


End file.
